ABSTRACT
Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor James Fenimore Cooper ever visited Oceania, but in their symptomatic texts the imaginings of Oceanians, made with superficial reference to particulars of the American Pacific archive, cut through broad parody and allegory to legitimate the lines of ideological debate at work in the formation of the Wilkes expedition, including what Brian Massumi calls a “media scare campaign” or “organized fear trade” (Massumi 1993: 4). It is against the effects of this campaign on perception – this spread of ignorance as it circulates into policy and performance – that Herman Melville wrote several of his harshest indictments of U.S. activities in Oceania.1 Like the members of the Wilkes expedition, whose violence he references early and late, Melville was in Oceania, and like theirs his views are the product of an intercultural experience. However, whereas Charles Wilkes is unambivalent, wholesale in his judgments, and self-righteous, Melville performs senses in which preconceptions destabilize perception and alter behaviour. He does this not because he has effectively distanced his narrative from the epistemologically limiting and distorting modes of seeing that he criticizes, but because he recognizes the difficulty of doing so. Among the most determinate pressures on vision Melville apprehends (playing on the pervasive use of the word “apprehension” during the period) is a fear-saturated, self/other delineating logic,
felt somatically, that sharpens aggression. The differences between Charles Wilkes’s official Narrative of the expedition (1845) and Melville’s performance of fear in Typee (1847) – foregrounded in this chapter – suggest complexities in midnineteenth-century intercultural representation or differences between competing forms of mimesis. The following chapter, on friendships among Islanders and U.S. citizens, assesses a coterminous counter-impulse toward intercultural intimacy and fraternity that runs throughout the American Pacific archive.
